Canada’s climate change commitments to go under microscope

Canada’s looming withdrawal from the Kyoto Protocol won’t stop the release of a final evaluation from the country’s environment watchdog of how close — or not — the country came toward meeting the agreement’s legally binding obligations.

Environment Commissioner Scott Vaughan will table his third and final Kyoto progress report in the House of Commons on Tuesday morning.

Vaughan’s report is required by the Kyoto Protocol Implementation Act, which Parliament passed in 2007 to ensure that Canada took “effective and timely action” to meet its obligations. It laid out specifics for both the environment minister and the environment commissioner, who works within the Office of the Auditor General. The minister is to develop and implement an annual action plan, and the commissioner is to evaluate its success.

Vaughan’s two prior Kyoto reports — in 2009 and 2011 — have shown the government is falling dramatically short on its goals. Canada’s Kyoto target was a six per cent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2012 compared to 1990 levels. But in 2008, Canada was 31 per cent over its target. Last October, Vaughan described Canada’s Kyoto reduction targets as “next to impossible” to meet.

The 2012 progress report is the final one that is legally required, Auditor General spokesman Ghislain Desjardins said. This year marks the end of the first Kyoto commitment period, and so the end of the government’s implementation stipulations. Though most other Kyoto countries signed onto a second phase at the UN climate change negotiations in Durban, Canada refused.

Green Party leader Elizabeth May said she has confidence in Vaughan’s work, and will welcome his non-partisan evaluation on Tuesday. She doesn’t expect the government to come out looking good, given its track record.

“On the face of it, there’s been a dismal lack of commitment to meet even the low targets the government has set for itself,” she said. “It’s absolutely stunning to have a federal budget in 2012 that doesn’t mention that we have climate commitments.”

Even before Environment Minister Peter Kent announced that Canada will legally withdraw from Kyoto, he has been pointing to the 2009 Copenhagen Accord as the new way ahead for Canada.

The minister’s commitment will be put to the audit test for the first time on Tuesday. In a second chapter of the report, Vaughan has chosen to examine Canada’s progress on meeting the 2020 goals, which call for Canada to reduce emission levels by 17 per cent below 2005 levels by 2020.

Critics have panned the agreement for being too weak, and not legally binding, but it is favoured by the Conservative government because it lines up Canada’s goals with those of the United States.

The report will also look at what Ottawa has done to clean up hazardous waste sites on federal land, and the financial impact of environmental damage arising from them.

Desjardins said that when choosing what to examine, the office looks for high-risk areas in government, such as those that might cost taxpayers significant amounts of money, or could threaten the health and safety of Canadians if something were to go wrong.